Roughing out the inequality bars

- Now that we've roughed in our design for our spark lines…for it to show our trends over time…it's time to add inequality.…If you remember from our sketch,…the plan was to do this sort of a split bar chart…next to the components,…so we're gonna have a center line…and then a little bar chart to the left or to the right…to indicate that inequality either…brought the country's score up, or rank, rather,…or it brought it down when it was factored…into the overall human development index.…What we're gonna do is we're gonna go back…to our vis draft layer which we've been working in.…

I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit here.…And I just, from a sense of scale,…again, even just looking at my sketch,…it's bigger than my trend lines, my spark lines area…so I'm gonna make an area about twice as wide as this,…this was about 3/4 of an inch,…I'm gonna make this about an inch and a half.…So I'm gonna just put my guide in there now to start.…Here is about an inch and a half…and let me zoom in on that area now…and I need to find the center point.…

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Released

3/26/2015

Making "big picture" data relevant for a general audience is a challenging yet common design job. Data visualizations are great solutions; they can illustrate important global issues and bring some of the interesting stories in the data to light.

The UN Human Development Index used in this course is a perfect example: a composite number used to rank countries on how well they're doing across a range of measures (such as health, wealth, and education). Instructor Bill Shander shows how to make this index data tangible and approachable by imagining the story and visual approach first. He then builds the design in Adobe Illustrator, capitalizing on some automation and scripting abilities the program offers. Start watching for unique insights into the entire data visualization process.

Topics include:

Working with the data

Sketching and wireframing your design

Roughing out the visual design components

Manually creating the design in Illustrator

Using Illustrator scripting to improve accuracy, speed, and repeatability